Google Liquid Galaxy becomes WebGL Aquarium

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Google’s Liquid Galaxy was originally created as a 20% time project looking into how geo products such as Google Earth could be more immersive. The result was an 8 LCD cubicle with a computer for each display synchronizing the view and a 3D joystick to control movement.

Liquid Galaxy then went open source allowing anyone to setup the experience for a cool $80,000. But such a setup wasn’t just limited to Google Earth views and has now been used to create an aquarium.

The aquarium is significant because it has been developed using a range of new and in fashion technologies including WebGL, HTML5, and JavaScript. It runs through Chrome and utilizes a Node.js server and WebSockets to keep everything in sync.

The code is available on googlecode with the open technologies being used allowing the aquarium to run on most multiple machine setups. The only prerequisite is that each machine’s clock be in sync because:

The aquarium runs almost entirely based on a clock. When in networked mode that clock is the system time of day clock. That means the position of the camera and every fish will be the same across machines if their clocks are in sync. Otherwise, using node.js and the socket.io library the master sends a JSON string with any new settings to the server. The server then broadcasts those settings to each of the machines.